


Human Folly Like The Back Of His Hand

by byzantienne



Series: Leo [29]
Category: In Nomine
Genre: Gen
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2013-12-30
Updated: 2013-12-30
Packaged: 2018-01-06 17:19:14
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 5,544
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/1109477
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/byzantienne/pseuds/byzantienne
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>It is eleven in the morning, and there is no reason Therese can think of that a man who could wear that suit would be aimlessly riding the Metro towards downtown Seattle, with the slow rain beading down the glass behind his sleek dark head.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Human Folly Like The Back Of His Hand

**Author's Note:**

  * Inspired by [Perfection Of A Kind](https://archiveofourown.org/works/1013095) by [fadeverb](https://archiveofourown.org/users/fadeverb/pseuds/fadeverb). 



The man on the other side of the bus has a glass-cut suit, sharp enough that he looks like a vision from some other, better-appointed world. Those slacks were never meant to touch the dingy felt of public transportation seating. The jacket is Italian-cut, single-breasted, with perfectly tailored peak lapels. The dark orange shirt glows like a coal against the grey worsted wool, the brightest point on the whole bus.

It is eleven in the morning, and there is no reason Therese can think of that a man who could wear that suit would be aimlessly riding the Metro towards downtown Seattle, with the slow rain beading down the glass behind his sleek dark head. 

The bus is Therese's territory. It belongs to her and the middle-aged mom holding two squirming kids in the next seat up, the guy in the McDonald's uniform on the way to his shift huddled in the back. A small legion of receptionists in off-the-rack pantsuits. College kids wrapped up in hoodies. The man in the suit is a walk-in, like the aliens from the after-midnight reruns of UFO-hunter shows. He's fallen through a hole in the world and onto the bus. Therese wraps her arms around her middle, shapeless herself inside her warmest and drabbest sweater, and cups her own ribs. The rain falls endlessly. She has been sitting in this seat for forty-five minutes. If she had a stop, she probably would have missed it.

She doesn't have a stop. The college kid disembarks, pulling his hoodie up over the spiky shock of his dyed-red hair, and Therese watches the man's eyes snap to him, evaluate, and unfocus again.

Therese rides the bus every day out of having nothing better to do. It is a substitute commute, a journey to absolutely nowhere. The first few times she'd boarded and rode downtown, she'd felt like she was playing hooky from some job, that she'd vanished, anonymous, into the city, where no one would know who she was and she could safely watch the rain and think of nothing and pull herself together enough for work the next day. Now it has become some sort of habit. She does not have work. She has a savings account she is draining far more slowly than she'd expected, and an answering machine that is no longer full of querulous, interrogating friends and colleagues.

The man in the suit never closes his eyes completely, even when he blinks. Or else Therese is not spotting when he blinks.

Two stops later, on an entirely anonymous streetcorner, he gets up and exits through the rear door. He doesn't have an umbrella and he doesn't duck away from the rain.

* * *

She puts her hair up and draws a slash of lipstick across her mouth. It is not a fashionable color, a bright matte coral or gloss of magenta: she is wearing last year's rose nude and it looks like paint over the pallor of her face. Seven-thirty in the evening and the world is already two hours dark. Her umbrella is black and utilitarian. She is going to get dinner from a restaurant like a civilized woman. She imagines holding a breezy and simple conversation with a waitress.

The rain soaks through her pumps, dampens the hound's-tooth fabric of the toebox. She shouldn't have worn these; they are skins from a former life. Wisps of her hair are coming down from her chignon by the time she decides on Thai, changes direction, walks for fifteen minutes with nothing but the silence in her own head and a brutal determination to not turn around and go home.

The man in the cut-glass suit holds the restaurant door for her, stepping out into the rain. Therese gapes at him. He has not changed his clothing since this morning. She doesn't know why she thought he _would_ have, just because she managed to put on slacks and an unwrinkled blouse. His eyes are large and black. She thinks that two generations back his parents might have lived in Beijing. He has the cheekbones of a Milan model, but his mouth is too wide for her to pick up the phone and call the agency to get him booked for photoshoots –

He moves around her like a dancer, like a crowded doorway full of people was water.

"Thanks," she says to his retreating back. The spots of rain on the shoulders of his suit spread like ink.

* * *

Sleep is not something Therese is good at. She never has been, but when she lived in New York it had not felt unnatural. Once, on a rooftop with the lights of the George Washington Bridge strung behind her like a garland, she had explained it to the man who she would have kept had the world been more hospitable to her keeping things. A tendency to get by on only the four hours between false dawn and full sun was an advantage for anyone whose job involved beautiful people and carefully orchestrated parties – now if only she could do it and not _look_ like she had! 

In Seattle, alone now for a quarter of a year, Therese watches the dawn begin to burn off the fog from out the window of the apartment she has occupied. Mt. Rainer slowly reveals itself. She has lost either three or four days; insomnia blurs the edges of time. It is probably the second week in November. 

She has seen the man in the cut-glass suit twice more that she is sure of, and once that she is counting regardless of veracity: just the shape of his shoulders disappearing around the corner of the aisle in the corner pharmacy. By now she can recognize the fluid quality of his movement without seeing his face.

Twice, she has looked up and seen him across the street from her, about to cross at a right-angle. His shirt was cerulean, once. Cream, once. It was not the same streetcorner; when she stops sleeping Therese foregoes the false commute of the bus and wanders the city on foot. She has seen him cross the street, never looking at her, in Belltown and at Capitol Hill; the motion is the same, like the stuttering replay of a tape. A man in a beautiful suit pauses, spares a glance for oncoming traffic, crosses the street, disappears. She has begun to think he is a ghost. 

He is not following her; he does not look at her. She is finding him by chance. It is the most interesting thing that has happened to her in months. It is more interesting than anything that she ever expected to happen to her again, here in the grey aftermath of her life. 

She isn't exactly looking for him when she leaves the apartment in leggings and a loose black runner's shirt, a scarf wound three-quarters of the way up her face; she means to jog in Madrona Park. She is not seeking. She has begun to think that if she sought, he would vanish; she stumbles upon him instead, halfway to the treeline.

For the first time, he is not alone.

Therese is not a superstitious woman: agnostic child of agnostic parentage, raised on good reason and the clear evidence of her eyes, the realities of her flesh. The insistent engine of photography and fashion was mysticism enough for her twice-over. Thus she does not, at first, believe; nor does she recognize what she sees. 

The man in the suit is fighting with another man, a smaller man in jeans and t-shirt and running shoes, with spiked blonde hair and a perfectly normal appearance. Therese would never have spotted him in a crowd. The fight is ugly and brutal. There is very little elegance in men hitting one another without the filter of a camera lens. The smaller man moves so fast that Therese loses track of his feet; the man in the suit is implacable and immovable and snatches, liquidly, at a pendant around the other man's neck. Twists it, chokes him with the chain. Punches him across the nose. The blood on the back of his knuckles is vivid red from twenty feet away. He yanks; the pendant-chain snaps and the smaller man falls backward, freed – 

\-- and rises as a whirling cloud of wind and spinning fire, thin red rings of burning light, a vortex like the superheated heart of a tornado. It screams something in a language which Therese does not understand and which hurts her ears with its beauty.

She is afraid. She is so very afraid. She is more afraid than she had been kneeling by the hospital bedside the last man she'd loved had died in; that had been inevitable, unavoidable, a slow winding-down like the end of the world and she had understood it. She does not understand this. She is ashamed. She cowers on the streetcorner, gone to her knees again.

The man in the suit is limned with the dawnlight; it catches on the palest dove-grey of his suit, on the palest cream-gold of his shirt. He laughs at the terrible whirling fire; he tucks the pendant into his breast pocket, spreads his newly empty hands in a perfectly stylish gesture of _I dare you to try._ Then he spins on his heel – the leather of his boots is bone-white – Therese cannot stop looking at the boots, it seems safer than looking at the rest of him. He spins. He turns his back on the fire, which does not burn him or strike him or do anything but vanish, but and the boots move toward her.

Therese gets up on her feet. She meets the man in the suit straight on. She is shaking.

"Have I seen you before?" he asks her. His voice is a human voice. American accent. Baritone. Pleasant.

"I don't know," she answers. "Where did you get your suit?"

He laughs, as if she's startled or pleased him. "It's bespoke," he says. 

Therese says, "Figures," says, "There's blood on your lapel." The words fall out of her. She has forgotten how to talk to people.

"Collateral damage," he says. He takes her elbow. She lets him.

"What," she tries. She gestures with the hand he hasn't trapped, a falling gesture, fingers to wrist to elbow, a sketch in the air.

He considers her. He is not taller than she is – Therese is a tall woman. She nevertheless feels his eyes like a weight from above, a looming. Then he says, "A very minor skirmish in a very old war."

Therese blurts, "Which side are you on?" like a child.

The man in the suit plucks a hair that has fallen from her head off of her sleeve, makes it vanish in his hand like a magician. "Which do you think?" he says. Then he lets her go.

He does nothing, walking away, that would break the perfect lines of the jacket. She wonders if angels do not get hands cold enough to put in pockets, or if they simply don't care.

* * *

Therese walks into the nearest café on autopilot and buys a cup of coffee, black and viciously hot. She sits in the window, perched on a bar-stool chair, her back achingly pin-straight. The bitter tannins roll down the back of her throat in a comforting burn. Seattle has better coffee than New York. She hasn't noticed that before. 

Not true: she hasn't noticed herself noticing. Just now everything feels very clear, clearer than it has in a long time. She breathes. The air fills up her lungs and stretches them. She considers whether or not she is going to have a crisis of faith. She doesn't feel as if she's having a crisis of anything. 

The world was one way, and now it is another way. In the new world, there are terrible supernatural entities that frighten her, and luck does not function as it previously had. In the new world, the man in the cut-glass suit is haunting Seattle for reasons of his own, and so is she, and they have coincided. They have overlapped.

Therese thinks she's quite calm, really. A hollowed-out, observant sort of calm. She drinks her coffee. She looks at her unshaking hands, at how she has let her cuticles grow back in around her nails in four months of not caring, four months of having the person who cared to look stolen away from her.

One way. Another way. She'd walked out of her life, four months ago, and into a different world. That was all.

* * *

Therese sleeps a blank and perfect seven hours, and in the morning she is deliberately not deliberate: she dresses for an unusually beautiful Sunday morning in early winter, skinny jeans and ankle-boots and a thin sweater-dress the same color as the carnivorous blue sky, and walks into the city aimlessly, patternlessly. She wanders. She feels, still, as if she's been flung open. Dislocated, like she is a joint put out of phase with the rest of the city, gliding unsocketed. 

She is a ghost, passing through the terrible traffic of the last pleasant day of the year. She belongs to the other world now, she thinks. She has belonged to it for a long time. It is not kind, the other world. 

She ends up in Pike Place Market because it is not where the man in the cut-glass suit would go, and she has decided not to look for him. She window-shops, as aimless as her walking had been, drifting from stall to stall. She touches nothing. There are a plethora of inexpertly dyed silk scarves. There is a stall full of blown-glass spheres, across the way from an absurd game where grown men toss fish back and forth to eachother. She reaches up to turn one – gold, and white, and grey, and she thinks of that beautiful suit, and the spots of blood that won't come out of a weave that fine – turns it to catch the light better, and sees in the sphere's reflection the back of the man in the suit's head, the arch of one bronze cheekbone. She turns, slowly. Spots him with her actual eyes.

He's watching someone else. 

It is quite clearly surveillance; he doesn't approach, and Therese can't spot his target, quite. Only that his target is moving, because he moves, too, and very slowly. She thinks he's keeping a distance of twenty or thirty feet. He's not in a suit. It is entirely startling. He is in pressed dark slacks and a grey shirt – _Ovadia and Sons,_ she thinks, the automatic catalogue-flip-through, and then, wryly even inside her own head, _expensive taste for an agent of the supernatural, I bet he expenses his dry-cleaning. Or has it magicked. Or buys a new shirt every day._

When he moves she follows him.

She hasn't followed him before, and she is rapidly aware that it is only because he is trailing someone else that he hasn't noticed her. She isn't any good at following. She's got dimly-remembered spy movies to work off of, those and a decade of trying to be seen instead of being invisible, and she knows that she'd be spotted if he paid her any attention.

Which he isn't doing.

She's narrowed down his target to either one of a pair of women holding hands – a delicate, sullen redhead and her Chinese girlfriend, who obviously likes shopping much more than she does – or a taller, broader woman, brown-skinned, probably Middle-Eastern, who looks like she might work in the Market. That sort of cheerful solidity, and a hat and fingerless gloves against the chill of working an outside stall all day. Therese wonders, abruptly, how many creatures like him there are in this city. In any city.

She is cold. When she lets herself be, she is not anything but cold. It washes through the empty calm in waves.

The man in the suit – she wishes she'd asked him his name, now that he isn't wearing a suit – pauses, stills. He almost disappears into the crowd. The Chinese woman kisses her girlfriend on the cheek and heads away down an alleyway and the man still doesn't move, so Therese thinks she can't be his target. She imagines what it would be like to have a secret ghost for a lover, a creature that would vanish without a reason or an explanation, to serve in some war that isn't for people who live in the bright and living world. She thinks it would hurt. She is sure it would hurt.

The expression on the face of the man in the suit is longing, angry, fixated. A camera would catch the narrowed eyes, the tension in the mouth.

She doesn't think he looks like that where anyone would know they can see him.

She blinks, and in the space of her blinking, he and the redhead and the Middle Eastern woman have all vanished and Therese is alone in the crowd.

* * *

It takes Therese eight hours to find him again. 

She doesn't know the rules of the new world: she'd set a grid pattern and crossed every street between her rented apartment and Washington University, and at every crossing she had been alone. If the rules of the new world require randomness, she has broken them already. By noon she is angry, a blank and obliterating sort of rage, like a whiteout inside her skull: she is alone and she doesn't understand how to stop being alone and the man in the cut-glass suit is a vision, a mirage, a falsehood. It is not fair that _wanting_ to find him should leave her destitute; if she isn't allowed to break the rules then someone ought to make the rules explicit. 

She wants to break them all, whatever they are; she cannot bear the idea that she has unknowingly been thrown out of whatever was happening, whatever coinciding was bringing her and the man in the suit to the same places. She stops from crossing streets and spends the afternoon visiting landmarks and tourist attractions, like stabbing blindly at a map with a pin. The Space Needle. The waterfront. The Sculpture Park. They are all empty. 

She finds him sitting in a café across from the Seattle Public Library, watching the plaza and the sharp lines of the architecture. Therese walks in the door, spots him – the dark grey suit, the orange silk shirt that burns like dying coals – and feels all that white rage transmute. She is weightless and determined. This time she walks up to him directly.

He is very still, and he is watching her from the third step she takes in his direction; watching her and not moving aside from the upward inflection of his eyebrows. 

His table is for two, the opposite chair empty. Therese sits in it.

The question which comes out of her mouth is, "Who are you waiting for?" 

There is minute tension in the corners of his eyes, there and then gone. "Aren't you interesting," says the man in the suit. "What's your name?"

Therese says, "Therese," says, "What's yours?" As if she had met him for coffee.

"John," he says. His smile is liquid-quick and white.

She's a bit indignant. She feels on the verge of inappropriate laughter. "That isn't your real name."

"Not quite, no," says the man in the suit, amused. "You're a very persistent woman, Therese."

She shrugs; she can't deny it. She has blisters on her feet from walking all over the city, her heels sliding inside rainboots. "The person you're waiting for," she says. "Is she – like you?"

His hand has settled on her wrist before she knew he'd moved. He presses it to the table firmly enough that she can feel her wristbones individually outlined. "Did someone send you to me, Therese?" he says.

She shakes her head. A strand of her hair is caught in the corner of her mouth. "I followed you," she says. "Just me. There isn't anyone else." She's proud of it, suddenly, viciously proud. "Your suits are too good. For me not to notice. It's an accident, I think? But I saw you and I saw the – the other thing – and then I kept following you. I've been walking all day. You're not waiting for me. I'm sorry. I hope you find her –"

John presses the fingers of his other hand to her lips, warm calloused fingertips like a shock. "Hush, I know exactly where she is," he says. "Do you trust me, Therese?"

She is afraid to speak, with his fingers against her mouth, so she just shakes her head. _No._

"That's fine," says John. His smile is just as liquid as before, but slow, like approaching a precipice. "This isn't permanent. You remember that."

Therese loves him so much.

She loves him like she'd die for him, like she'd do anything for his good regard. She'd crawl after him on her knees across a thousand more streetcorners, she'd sell her soul, she'd do _anything_ , anything, she doesn't even need something back, just the opportunity to do what he wants her to do. She tilts her head and rubs her cheek against his fingers like a kitten would, and he smiles at her and flips the escaped strand of her hair behind her ear.

"Tell me who you work for," says John.

That's easy. She's so glad it's a easy question. "I don't work for anyone," she says. "I quit my job and I turned off my phone plan and I have a really stupid amount of money and I'm just waiting for it to run out."

He makes a sort of chuffing noise, interest-surprise. She hopes she's doing what he wants, hopes like it'd kill her if she's not. "Good girl," he says, and she _glows_ , she blushes, knows it's visible like a stain across her cheeks, her skin is so goddamn translucent in the winter.

He tilts his head slightly to one side, narrows his eyes at her, concentrating.

It shatters, the love-feeling, the transcendence of looking at him. Therese shudders. Her arms are wrapped around her middle, desperate; she's hollow and alone and miserably angry. She doesn't know how he made her feel like that. She's never been in love like that in her life, not even with the man she'd watched die on her, she's _never_ , and he turned her on and off like a switch.

"What did you do to me," she says.

"I said it wasn't permanent," John says. "But it must sting. Especially you, you're all alone."

Therese finds it in herself to say, "So are you."

"Clever but not quite right," John says. 

"You know where she is but she's not here, is she?"

"For a human," says John, "you are very brave, and for a woman who can follow me across half of Seattle, you are very foolish." He's still smiling but all she can think of is the giant whirling wheel of fire, and the blood on his knuckles. 

She says, "I don't have any reason not to be."

"Apparently not. Tell me why you quit your job."

She tells him. She doesn't know if she does it because she's afraid, or because he asked her without making her love him first. She tells him the entire thing: how she'd worked in editorial fashion, alone. Her parents dead young, never someone who kept friends, preferred keeping photographs and art and beautiful people instead. They were set off better by the lights of the city. How she'd found someone she wanted to keep in the flesh, and how he'd died – meaninglessly, unfairly, eaten up by his own mutating body – how she'd left the hospital and quit her job and bought a plane ticket and walked out of the world. 

"It doesn't matter very much," she says, at the end. "Except that if you wanted to hide from people like me you need to wear worse suits." She feels like she's poised precisely between two sorts of hysteria, one with tears and one without, and he could push her instantly either way.

All he says is, "Do you think it's fair, what happened to you?"

"No," says Therese. "And I won't believe you if you tell me it was all God's plan. Even if you are an angel."

John laughs, a rich warm sound. "That's the first time you've guessed wrong," he says. "An angel would have told you it was fair. I'd never be so insulting."

"It wasn't," Therese says. He'd never said which side he was on. She knows she should be more frightened than she is. 

"It wasn't," John agrees. "Very few things are fair, on any end of the War."

"What is?"

"Taking what you want," says John. "Taking what you want and leaving everything else behind."

"That's romanticism –"

"Quite." Liquid-silver smile above the cut-glass suit; she can't look away and that's her own inability, not the magic lovestruck insanity he'd made her feel. "But surprisingly accurate anyhow."

"You didn't tell me what you did to me. Before."

"I needed to know you weren't a Soldier of God," John says. "Some humans are. Some humans are also excellent liars. How well do you lie, Therese?"

"I tell people that they look good in photographs. Also, that I'm coming home."

He pats her wrist and lets her free. "Good enough," he says. "Some of us can do things like that to you. I'm telling you so you know what you'd get into if you say yes to what I'm about to ask you to do. Some of us will do far worse things to you than make you feel a little bit of infatuation."

"You don't know what that felt like," Therese says. "There isn't anything that'd be worse. For me." She doesn't know who she's trying to convince. She doesn't want him to leave her here in this coffeeshop, alone.

"You'll do fine."

"What am I going to do fine _at_?"

"Taking what I need you to take. And then whatever you want to take."

Therese says, "How?" It's raining again, outside. Loud and streaky against the windowpanes.

He tells her how. It ends up mostly having to do with acoustics.

* * *

She does it in the evening of the next day. They do it together. She wears a dress, a long single piece of black Japanese silk that sweeps from shoulder to thigh, and flat boots. Her feet are bandaged inside, but the broken blisters still sting on every step. John picks her up in a car, an elegant silver Audi that smells of another woman's perfume, something amber and musk. John drives it – badly. It is the first thing she's seen him do badly. She wonders if anyone ever taught him how. If he was a human -- _if he was a human!_ \-- she'd ask him if he'd been born in New York City. She doesn't ask. They drive to a restaurant in Bellevue.

John gives her the gun, and the gloves, delicate tooled black leather that look too large for her hands and fit precisely. He explains: the gloves and the gun are a piece. The gloves will show her how to shoot the gun.

"I'll talk," he says. "You shoot if I tell you to. Otherwise sit there and give the man something to look at while he's terrified."

"Who am I shooting?" Therese asks. It seems necessary for her to know.

"You probably aren't shooting anyone at all," says John. "But if you shoot anyone it'll be a black-market antiquities dealer who hasn't come through on a shipment. Aim for the knees first."

The gun is a sleek and heavy weight in her hands. Therese turns it over, and over, and over.

"Ethical problems, Therese?"

She considers. She is about to walk into a restaurant with what she is entirely sure is a demon, and possibly commit murder. She could say yes. _Yes, John, I have ethical problems with this._

What would happen to her afterwards is a great blank space in her mind, an unimaginable possibility.

"No," Therese says.

"Come on, then," says John. He opens the car door for her, and the restaurant door afterward, and pulls out her chair in the tiny back room, across from a sweating blond man in an off-the-rack suit that looks like he bought it in an airport in Eastern Europe.

John orders them drinks. The gun rests in Therese's lap, in full view of the waiter, who politely ignores it, the way he politely ignores the briefcase on the table next to the antiquities dealer, who already has a scotch-and-soda, the ice mostly melted already from the heat of his hand. The drinks, when they come, are old-fashioned and elegant: gibsons, their tiny pearl onion garnishes glowing in the base of the martini glasses.

John and the antiquities dealer talk. Therese sips vermouth and gin and pierces an onion with her teeth, sour-sweet bursting on her tongue, the weight of the gun heavy against her thighs. 

It takes quite some time. At one point, John touches her shoulder, and she picks up the gun, and she aims it quite precisely at the antiquities dealer's left eye. Hazily, she realizes she is practicing good trigger discipline, and that she hadn't known what trigger discipline was until just this moment.

He goes white.

She smiles at him. She ought to be wearing oxblood lipstick, like the heroine of a 1940s noir film. She isn't.

He opens the briefcase. Therese doesn't know the provenance of the pieces inside. They're mostly jade. Probably Chinese. John picks three and makes them disappear into his suit, that magician's trick again.

Then he says, "Therese, shoot him."

She hesitates. Of course she hesitates. Then she adjusts her aim and pulls the trigger. The kick of the gun feels like a bruise spreading all the way from the heel of her hand to her shoulder.

The elbow of the antiquities dealer is not there anymore.

There is blood on the tablecloth.

John – John ruffles her hair, and smiles at her while he takes the gun from her hand, and says, "Well, he'll remember _you_."

Therese stands up. The antiquities dealer is making noises which do not sound human. But no one will know that a creature like John was ever here. _Silent job_ , he'd said. At the beginning.

Now John says, "Pick one." He gestures to the briefcase. "Anything you like. Something you want."

There is a comb in the shape of a kingfisher. She takes it. She holds it in a closed fist and it bites into her skin while John ushers her out of the restaurant and back to the car. The sidewalk is wet, and the streetlights reflect up off of it, a sheen of orange.

They drive. John does not drive better in the rain.

* * *

John stops the car at a commuter rail station. The signs read _South Tacoma_ and glisten, dripping. He unfolds her clenched fingers from around the kingfisher comb and nestles it in her hair. The tines press gently against her scalp.

"Is there anything in Seattle you care about keeping?" he asks. He isn't looking at her. He's watching the lights above the tracks, the way they're haloed in the damp air. 

She's carrying her ID and her credit cards. She could get more dresses. Different shoes. She wonders if they're about to drive into the dark, an endless sort of Bonnie and Clyde partnership where he tells her who to shoot. "No, nothing," says Therese. "Not really." 

"Good." He drops the keys to the Audi in her hand, closes her fingers over them again. "The car's hot but not that hot. If you get to Oakland by morning you won't get caught."

Therese repeats, "Oakland?" like she's some kind of echolaliac. 

"Oakland," says John. "The address is in the glove compartment. They'll know what to do with the car."

"What will they do with me?" she asks, before she can stop herself.

"You're a little bit more useful than a stolen car. They'll do a lot of things, I'd guess."

"You're not coming."

"You know that, Therese."

The other world is not kind. That was the first thing she learned. She shouldn't have expected it to stop being true.

John gets out of the driver's seat and comes around to open her door for her. She climbs free, walks around the front of the car. The rain comes down on her shoulders and spots the silk of her dress and she thinks, blankly, _I can get a new one_. He backs her against the driver's-side panel. The mirror presses into her hip, a smear of chilly metal. His arms bracket her. 

"John?" she says. If he kisses her she isn't sure what she'll do. Scream. Melt onto the hood of the car under him.

"Not my name," he says. He leans in, his breath warm on her ear, under the kingfisher comb. "Tell Oakland that Zhune sent you," he says.

Therese watches him walk into the train station, his shadow elongating under the sodium-orange lights. 

When she gets into the Audi it's the warmest place she's been in months. Her hands are steady on the wheel.


End file.
